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Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Here’s the thing about money: Very few of us understand it,
and most of us fear it.

Nor am I an expert, which may or may not be a good thing.
Because the experts will throw you into an ocean of terms and concepts and
expect you to swim. What can I do? Tell you a simple story.

Two people in their mid-80’s did everything they were
supposed to do, and did it very well. They worked hard, they were frugal, they
sent their children to get Master’s degrees even though they themselves had
never travelled to Europe. The husband invested in Puerto Rico bonds, which
were considered safe, and which had the advantage of being free of taxes on the
federal, state, and municipal levels.

They didn’t do the one thing that everyone with a little
money should do: Spread it around. Don’t put your eggs in one basket: buy real
estate, invest broadly in the stock market, and invest in bonds, and throw some
money into a savings account. Why? Because if one thing goes sour, well, at
least two of the others are likely to be OK. (I know, if there’s a general
collapse of the market—a financial melt-down—you’re screwed, but so is everyone
else, so we can all be miserable together, and hey—there’s always the beach!)

So Puerto Rico issued bonds, as does every other
municipality, and a bond is nothing more than a loan that bondholders make in
return for—usually—very low interest. Why the low interest? Because the
investments are considered safe: The municipality will repay, since the growth
in the economy will mean increased revenue.

Now, the elderly couple mentioned above? Well, the husband
was an excellent engineer, but what did he know about money? So he went to the
expert, who did know about money, and who told him to buy Puerto Rico bonds,
which were excellent investments, and which were tax-exempt. Being a proud
Puerto Rican, he did just that.

That may have been a mistake, and when the red flags were
raised, a couple of years ago, the engineer’s son scrambled to sell all those
bonds, some at a profit, most not. But what about me? Am I any smarter? Because
when I was working, I contributed to my 401K plan, and did I examine my fund’s
portfolio, to see if it had any Puerto Rican funds? Of course not, who does?
And look, it’s not just Puerto Rico, it has been variously Detroit, Spain, Greece
and Argentina. So I very likely hold some Puerto Rican bonds, and the
likelihood is that every small investor, frugally saving for retirement, does
as well.

Now then, for people like me who are unwilling or
disinclined to spend ten or twelve hours a day watching their money and probing
into global markets, trends, and politics, there are the credit rating firms,
and their job—in theory—is to protect the investor. And these people do what I
don’t, and they saw very clearly the writing on the wall, and were very open in
their warnings. They said it again and again, and they lowered our credit
rating notch by notch, until we were at junk rating.

This was a disaster, but one that only now is beginning to
be felt, because what did Puerto Rico do? Here’s Bloomberg
on the topic:

The U.S.
territory sold the securities March 11, in the largest junk deal ever for the
$3.7 trillion municipal market. The borrowing came the month after the island
was cut to speculative grade, and gave officials enough cash to pay bills
through June 2015 as they try to revive a shrinking economy. Most of the
original purchasers were hedge funds, and first-day trading in the bonds
exceeded $5 billion.

Date of article: 23 March 2014. And the amount of
debt sold? 3.5 billion.

The whole thing was profoundly immoral, but was
it a secret? Did it happen behind closed doors? Of course not, since I was
reading all about it and scratching my head and thinking, ‘who in God’s name
would buy this terrible debt?’

Well, we now know, and even more cynical was that
the bonds were marketed specifically for the hedge funds and their more
rapacious cousins, the vulture funds. Why? Because the minimum price was
100,000$, and if anybody out there reading this has that kind of money, well,
leave a comment below, because I’d really like to meet you!

The politicians got into bed with the hedge funds
and now? The left is gearing to go nuts about the austerity measures, as
evidenced by this headline:

Hedge funds tell Puerto Rico: lay off teachers and close
schools to pay us back

That’s The
Guardian, hardly a fly-by-night operation. Because the hedge funds have
been keeping an eye on the island, and they are perfectly capable of producing
a chart like this:

OK—firing teachers makes a great headline, but wait: Can you
explain why spending on education has soared while the number of students has
plummeted? I’m a teacher, myself, and the last group of people I’d go after is
educators. But has all of that spending actually gotten down to the teachers? Are
the parking lots filled with Porches? Are students issued MacBook Pros every
year?

Sorry—wrong questions. How’s this: Is there even any toilet
paper in the schools?

So the hedge funds own how much of Puerto Rico’s debt? About
half, according to The Nation, and yes, it’s hard to weep for hedge funds,
especially as compared to the little kids trooping into Escuela Luis Muñoz
Marín. But I might have some tears for the engineer—remember him?—who saw half
his wealth disappear. Might just as well have gone to Europe.

And I’m especially sorry for him, since I know very well who
is going to take the hit, because the hedge funds? They’ve already lined up
counsel, they’ve already planned their strategy, and the little guy who is left
standing by the mailbox? All he can do is read his investment statement, and
watch his money go down the drain.

The other element in all of this, unfortunately, is
colonialism, but I wonder if the real issue at hand will be addressed. Because
it is not the big bad United States that imposed…. Nor is it the incompetent,
lazy leeches down in Puerto Rico….

Puerto Rico has excellent professionals; we have the
expertise to run our government. What don’t we have? The curse of colonialism
is that it maintains you societally in a perpetual adolescence: You are never
fully responsible, nor do you enjoy full rights. And how irresponsible have the politicians--and by extension all of us, since by the way, didn't we elect them?--been. Well, check out this graphic….

Enter the last part of the equation: An uninformed,
ill-educated populace that despite the billions of dollars poured somewhere
into our education system cannot tell me basic facts, such as what part of the
island Mayagüez is located. I know: I used to teach the cardinal points in ESL
classes for 25 years. And what will happen as the busses are cut, the schools
closed, the benefits slashed, and the austerity begins for real?

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

I freely admit it: I’m out of control on the subject, though
I had tried hard to rein myself in, since even I, a Norwegian-American, can
summon up enough moral Nordic rectitude to deal with the Catholic church and
its treatment of the sexual abuse scandals. At a certain point, there’s nothing
more to say: Yes, the priests f…cked around and the bishops covered it up.

That said, the case of Józef Wesolowski certainly is unlike
any other. You may remember, he was the papal nuncio for the Dominican Republic
and the apostolic delegate for Puerto Rico, since one of the most crushing
blows about not being an independent state is that we cannot have formal
relations with the Vatican. Ouch—boys, that one really hurt!

Wesolowski showed complete lack of imagination in his sexual
tastes, though it was shoeshine boys and not altar boys, but he was certainly
industrious, since reports have that he had more almost 100,000 pornographic
images on his computer. So on 21 August 2013, Wesolowski was recalled to the
Vatican, as was another Polish priest, Wojciech Gil.

Well, that’s the official story. The unofficial story is
that the archbishop of Santo Domingo was sufficiently alarmed at the press that
was going to explode that he ran off to Rome and talked to Pope Francis, who
recalled Wesolowski.

Can anyone believe that this pope is serious about the abuse
scandal? Well, tell it to the numerous Romans who saw Wesolowski walking the
streets of Rome, outside of Vatican City. Right, so when they got enough flak
about that, they placed Wesolowski on house arrest, and then began the slow,
tedious process of determining what to do with Wesolowski.

They did the only thing possible: They defrocked him. OK—here’s
the catholicnews.com
on the subject:

The Vatican announced in June that a canonical court had investigated
Wesolowski on charges of sex abuse in the Dominican Republic and concluded by
dismissing him from the clerical state, depriving him of all rights and duties
associated with being a priest except the obligation of celibacy.

Guys? You’re
expecting a man with a tenth of a million pornographic photos on his computer
to be celibate? This creep is a predator with a major addiction to porn,
and you think he’s gonna be celibate?

Right—so then it
was a much-touted criminal trial, due to begin ten days ago. But Wesolowski’s
lawyer walked into court, the morning of the first day of the trial, and
announced that Wesolowski was in intensive care at a Rome hospital. Of course,
of course, no one could say what ailed (or rather, what else ailed) the
former papal nuncio, but remember, this is Rome, and those Italian tongue? They
quite frequently wag.

So six days later,
a Roman
newspaper published a rumor of what I immediately suspected: The ex-prelate
had arrived at the hospital confused and dazed from a mixture of alcohol and
drugs. In short, Wesolowski was about to add the sin of suicide to the long
list of others. So the trial was delayed, and then, three days after he was
hospitalized, Wesolowski was released.

OK—it was eye
rubbing, but was it worth writing about? Were we all just a little tired of it
all? Yup, but I was still following the saga, when I came upon this:

The
Vatican said in a June 15 statement that
Wesołowski has been accused of a number of offenses, “some committed during his
stay in Rome from August 2013 until the moment of his arrest, on Sept. 22,
2014.” Other offenses were allegedly committed when he was nuncio to the
Dominican Republic and apostolic delegate to Puerto Rico, from 2008 to 2013,
the Vatican said.

OK—it’s clear: While being recalled by the Vatican for an
investigation of sexual abuses, Wesolowski had continued his predatory
behavior under Francis’s nose. But in the statement above, is the Vatican
alleging that Wesolowski committed offenses here, in Puerto Rico?

OK—followed the
link and got this, in Italian. Do I speak the language? Of course not, but
anybody who has studied Latin, French and Spanish can figure it out:

OK—so
that Vatican is not alleging that Wesolowski committed crimes in Puerto Rico,
but who is? Well, as you can see in the clip below, a number of the
parishioners are: Wesolowski
had visited the island frequently and had stayed in the parish of St.
Martín de Porres, apparently as a guest of José Colón Otero, a priest who was
removed after allegations of abuse…

…OK,
the story is wacky enough to warrant its own paragraph. According to witnesses,
boys were seen staying over at the parish house, and the next morning they were
unable to look anybody in the eye. So the Vatican at last looked into it, and
then defrocked Colón Otero. So what did the pope do, when the ex-priest
appealed the decision? Partially reinstated him, since it could there wasn’t
enough “moral certainty” to convict him of abuse, only of violating the
sanctity of the confession.

What’s interesting about this case is what hasn’t
happened, as much as what has. The Dominican Republic hasn’t requested
Wesolowski’s extradition, perhaps because they
don’t have a treaty that allows them to do so. But Poland
requested extradition, and got turned down. The reason? Diplomatic immunity.
But what about now, when Wesolowski has been defrocked? Presumably, that no
longer applies; on the other hand, it might.

What else hasn’t happened? Well, the church has played a
very old game: Out wait your enemies. And so the problems in the archdiocese of
Arecibo, and the predation of a papal nuncio or an apostolic delegate or
whoever he was have been completely forgotten, because everybody has just
discovered that we owe some undetermined billions of dollars.

That’s one explanation. But the conspiracy theorist in me
can’t help but wonder: The island is overwhelmingly Catholic, especially in the
upper classes. The quiet word can be so very effective, when whispered in the
right ear. I can only believe two things.

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Well, it must be true, because I read about it in The New
York Times: The whole damned island is depressed.

Or not, since the financial crisis elicits varying responses
of anger, rants, and problem-solving. Oh, and also a good deal of
finger-pointing, as evidenced by this:

Yes—we spend 39 million a year to drive our governors
around, and provide police protection, which is certainly needed, since the
last governor laid off 20,000 people, and do you think he’d survive a bus ride
through Cataño? Not likely. OK—then there’s this:

Well, the governor is sure that we’ll all be willing to make
sacrifices, just as he and Wilma have, but allegedly his Ferragamo shoes cost
nearly 700 bucks, when you add in our 11.5% sales tax.

Do I need to add more? A more serious blogger would look up
the picture someone took of Melba Acosta drinking wine and eating lobster,
although as I recall it, the wine was obvious but the lobster couldn’t be
verified. At least I didn’t see it.

Found it! I'm serious after all!

What was the point? The point was that the financial crisis
is not my problem, dammit, it’s the politicians who stole the money and
gave suspicious contracts to their cronies borrowed and borrowed and now? Fuck
‘em!

Then we have the outsiders peering in, often with little or
no knowledge of the island or the culture. So Don
Young of Alaska thinks Puerto Rico is at the boiling point, ready for
revolution; Paul
Krugman, however, tells us that Puerto Rico is no Greece. Great to know!

Politics—of course!—gets into it. The folk favoring
independence will tell you: The Jones Act that mandates that we use American
shipping costs us a lot of money (does it? Who knows?) Statehooders: If
we weren’t a colony and were a state, we could refinance our debt through
bankruptcy, just as all the other states can. And lastly, the deluded group
that holds that we are a separate country joined in a bilateral union with the
United States? Well, along with Wilma and the governor, we’re all (meaning
everybody but Wilma and the governor and the ruling classes) yes, we are all
(please revisit last parentheses) going to have to make sacrifices. Oh, and the
governor just stumbled upon those Ferragamo shoes at the Salvation Army—one of
those lucky days!

It’s all nonsense, of course, since there are a lot of guys
out there in the business district of San Juan who are wearing shoes every bit
as expensive as the governor. And the 39 million for police protection for
former governors? Look, in the face of 73 billion, it’s nothing.

What is something, and what no one is talking about,
is that our government has 230,000
employees, as compared to the 110,000
public employees of the state of Wisconsin, and do I really have to trawl
through the Internet to tell you that Wisconsin has almost twice as many people
and a lot more land and also something called snow, a lot of which fell for six
months between October and (probably) May, and which is hugely expensive to
remove?

And you know, we’re all complicit in this, because although
of course your mother or sister or brother-in-law or maybe the whole
damn family are ferociously working public servants, veritably pounding the
streets outside, pestering the passers by with offers to help the citizenry! Of
course, of course, we all know that! It’s all the other lazy, shiftless,
indolent-with-attitude shirkers that are clogging up the government. Still, it
has to be said, there are a lot of everybody else’s brothers and sisters and
whole damn families.

And those politicians? All of those thieving bastards that
got us into this mess? Guess what—they’re there because we voted for them, and
if we had been reading the newspaper, all those years, we could have seen very
clearly what was coming, since it was the headline year after year about the
government deficit, and the borrowing, and the issuing of more and more bonds.

But no, we don’t read the newspapers because it’s too
depressing and the politicians are all crooks and they just steal the money and
there’s nothing we can do about it. So now, all of a sudden, it’s the
hedge-funds—read vultures—who are circling above and extorting exorbitant
interest for that drop of water on the dying man’s tongue! Hah! Bastards!

God knows, it’s hard to defend a hedge fund, but if you need
a loan until payday, where do you go? First to the bank, and then after they
begin to look funny and then reject you, you go to the little payday loan store
and then, if even that doesn’t work, you go down to the corner to the loan
shark, and guess what? At this point, your rate is not the 3% that Banco
Popular was charging you. And that’s where we are, folks!

So now we’re in trouble—enough trouble to get the government
to commission the Krueger
Report, which meant that three economists came down and told us what we’ve
heard repeatedly and never acted upon. The tax base is eroding, we are
uncompetitive in terms of labor costs, there’s no plan to develop the economy,
and we can’t pay the debt or go back and get some more. Oh, and nobody is
working or if they are, it’s in the informal economy—and who cooked up that
term, by the way? Whatever happened to “black market?”—and a huge number of us
are receiving benefits of some sort.

They walk among us, folks, since the guy who sold me the
Perrier I’m now drinking told me, in passing, that he has both the state health
card and the Department of Family card—the “informal economy” equivalent of “food
stamps.” Another employee is working full-time but getting title 8 housing,
because she’s supposedly unemployed. And a customer came in recently and
complained that his cell phone got lost, and then when he went to replace it at
whatever government agency replaces cell phones, well, guess what? Somebody
made a mistake and he was listed on the wrong list, or the government changed
providers, and so he has go to Sprint or somewhere, all because of the
government inefficiency, and isn’t that outrageous? No, but what is
outrageous….

But what I really wanted to tell you is the story of
a guy who is painting my apartment and doing a wonderful job of it, though the
work is coming along slowly, since he has a full time job, he’s in the Army
Reserves and so that’s his part time, and he is still broke because he’s paying
child support.

The point is, this guy used to have a construction company,
with his father-in-law or ex-father-in-law. So the economy went bust and his
company went bust, and then he couldn’t pay his child support, so he went to
court, and then he went, in handcuffs and shackles, to a solitary cell,
awaiting transfer to jail.

“I just sat there and shook. I mean, I saw my whole life go
down the toilet. Look, when I had money, I paid! And so how is putting me in
jail for six months gonna help? First, I’m gonna lose my job. Then, the army is
gonna give me a dishonorable discharge, ‘cause they’re looking for any excuse
to get rid of people and reduce the benefits they gotta pay. And when I
realized that absolutely everything was gone, I broke down and sobbed.”

Guys? This is an army guy, this is a guy who does
construction and likes chicks—fatally so. This is not a guy who breaks
down and sobs.

He got two breaks: His ex-wife relented and talked to the
judge, and I gave him some money for child support. So he’s free, except not,
because after he finished the morning work of painting my apartment, he took
public transportation to Bayamón, then walked 45 minutes under the blazing sun
to his hospital job, and then worked his 8-hour shift, walked that 45 minutes back
to the public transportation, went through three municipalities and stumbled on
home. Dear Reader—did you get tired just reading that sentence?

Unsurprisingly, this guy gets sick a lot, especially now,
when the sky has turned an eerie milky blue, since huge amounts of Sahara sand
have drifted over the Atlantic and are now above us, slowly drizzling down and
blotching our cars and acting like asbestos in our lungs. So not a problem, if
you’re in air-conditioning all day and night, but that hour and a half that
he’s walking daily on the streets of Bayamón? He’s got a sandbox in his lungs.

This financial crisis, as invisible as the Saharan sand, as
felt and weakening and sickening, as insidious, as gradually and inevitably
lethal? Yes, we are all complicit, but some more so than others, and if today
the guy who has three jobs has failed to show up to finish the painting? I know
perfectly well: He’s exhausted, he sleeping, and all he can handle today is one
job, not two.

So the question is not the Ferragamo shoes or the lobster or
the policemen driving our corrupt governors back and forth from the country
clubs. Yes—we’re all complicit, but some more than others. And yes, we’ll
certainly join you and Wilma, Guv, in making those sacrifices! But while do I
feel that the burden of those sacrifices will not be felt by the people who are
living and eating off the government? And why do I feel that you and Wilma
won’t feel too much of a sting, either? Why is it, in fact, that I know
perfectly well whose shoulders this is going to fall on, and you do too, and
you’ve even seen him, or you could have, since he’s quite visible and
quite exposed, as you drive past him, Guv and Wilma, in your air-conditioned SUV
with the tinted windows and the police escort. Yes, he’s perfectly visible,
that guy who’s going to made the sacrifices, that guy out there….

Thursday, July 2, 2015

You know all about it—the 73 billion bucks that the 16 or so
public agencies plus the general government in Puerto Rico owe. And you know
that the governor came out last Sunday in The New York Times saying that the
debt was “non-payable.” So we are in full crisis, or near full crisis, since we
did manage to pay 1.9 billion bucks that we owed. And you even have read the Krueger report,
which details all the various paths that led inexorably to the edge of this
cliff.

But while the island has been in crisis, the café where I
write has been in crisis, too.

“I have to raise $60,000 by the end of the month, Marc,”
said Lady, who was faced with the twin challenge of just getting to the bathroom,
since about half of her shin had been removed in a recent surgery. So she was
crippled on various fronts.

Well, there were various attempts at help, though there was
also a certain lack of coordination. In fact, for insouciant
going-your-own-way, poets could teach even cats a trick or two.

There was Geronimo, who declared that he would cook a
delicious dinner, all with the finest ingredients that he had himself collected
from remote and mountainous locations on the island.

“He made lasagna out of nettles, Marc,” reported Sunshine
the next day. “I mean, I saw him making the stuff, and he couldn’t even touch
the things. So he was using this!” Sunshine then held up the large tongs that
bakeries use to get the doughnuts out of the cases.

“And he expected anyone to eat this stuff? I mean look at
this.”

So he showed me a completely untouched tray of lasagna, each
piece of which was adorned with, yes, a nettle.

“So did anyone come?”

“That’s what I asked Lady…”

“And?”

“Seis de mis proprios
gatos….”

Right—six of her own cats, which is twice the usual number
for describing an event failure, but still not very good.

“Then Geronimo turned around and told Lady that she owed him $170, since he had spent that on ingredients! Can you believe that?”

“Well, those nettles don’t come cheap….”

It had been rather unpromising from the beginning, since
Geronimo had conceived the affair based on the purchase of tickets, the minimum
price being $60 per person. The only trouble was that even the person nominally
in charge of the event—as well, putatively, of Geronimo—couldn’t understand the
concept. So that boiled over into hurt feelings and recriminations and then,
when another friend (who had not incidentally contributed 1000 bucks to help)
had stepped in to mediate, Geronimo had ordered her out of the kitchen. Well,
well—we all know that chefs can be fussy.

The next step was to set up a crowd funding site, and so
Lady’s sister-in-law—her Latin blood at full boil—stepped up and created a site
on GoFundMe.com. She described
with the pen of Dickens the dastardly actions of the legal foe that had brought
Lady and the Passage to the brink, nor did she spare the adjectives, of which
“petty, vindictive, mean-spirited” were the more palatable. Ah, it was vigorous
indeed but…

“Lady, you have GOT to take that thing off the Internet, and
you’d better hope your step-father or whoever he is hasn’t seen it. Oh, and
especially the judge!”

“BUT IT’S TRUE!” cried Lady, who was anyway not at her best,
since now it wasn’t going to the bathroom, but rather going down the 25 steps
out of her apartment that had been the challenge.

“So write it to me and text me…”

Right—do that, and then to the work of….well, what?
Shouldn’t there be signs? How are people going to know that there’s a crisis? I
decided to try to make a flyer, since my version of Word has templates for such
things, but guess what? The photo—which anyway was upside down and refused to
get right side up, and who knew that a photo could get so drunk?—was either
swallowing the headline—Save The Poet’s Passage—or the headline was swallowing
the photo. The point was, they were't not cooperating, which meant that the good Taí,
always my cavalry coming over whatever technological hill I’m in front, had to
step in. This she did, efficiently, and even refused payment! Thanks, Taí.

So now it’s time to herd up the many people who love the
Poet’s Passage, who kiss Lady every time they see her, and ask her for twenty
or thirty bucks half the time they see her. If Lady could find the word
“no” in her capacious and poetic vocabulary, she’d have the 60 grand.

“I’ll join you, just as soon as I finish this poem,” says
Carly, a poet and ex-worker, who was exed after some financial unpleasantness.

“MOTHERFUH! I can’t believe that Niggah ain’t out here with
us, pounding these damn streets under this fuckin’ sun!”

So said Montalvo, whom I had enlisted, along with Norma. So
it’s just the three of us out there, since Carly is grappling with the double
weight of double paternity, which means that he is absorbing the poetic and
air-conditioned atmosphere of the Passage, while his girlfriend calmly observes
the twins shitting on the all-white sofa.

“Well, I’ve certainly found out who the sharks are,” said
Lady, since she had been fielding various proposals to buy the building at
ridiculous sums, or buy the café for the purpose of turning it into a cat
café—brilliant, but impossible according to the Health Department—or other
schemes, all very much not to the benefit of Lady.

So it all worked out, though a day before Lady had to go
into court and tell the judge if she had the sixty grand, she was still over
ten thousand short. But no problem, since 10 grand materialized in an “off-line
donation,” and somebody just donated 15 bucks 26 minutes ago, even though the
goal has been reached (we’re at $60, 720) and the crisis is officially over.

So we’ve moved on, or rather not, since the point of it all
was that nobody wanted to move on—not Elizabeth’s two children who have
valiantly responding to the crisis by alternately playing video games or
snoozing, and not Carly nor his girl friend nor their progeny, doing what
progeny do in the first year of life, and not the tall grey-haired gringo in the corner, who knows—slightly—how
Lady got the sixty grand she needed to keep us all in place.

Life, Death and Iguanas

Life, Death…and Iguanas?Yes, that’s the title of an e-book available on Amazon / Kindle. It’s the story of a woman who took charge of her death, just as she had her life. Of a family that split, and then united. Of a man who decided to live. Oh, and there’s some great stuff about iguanas….Read the first chapter by clicking here!